Ray Ison, Professor in Systems at the UK Open University since 1994, is a member of the Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Group. From 2008-15 he also developed and ran the Systemic Governance Research Program at Monash University, Melbourne. In this blog he reflects on contemporary issues from a systemic perspective.

Thursday, August 03, 2017

"... I was pleased to have the opportunity to hear Clive Hamilton speak at
the University of Bristol in the spring of 2017. Hamilton, an
Australian ‘public intellectual’, Professor of Public Ethics at Charles
Stuart University in Canberra, has been central to the debate about the
nature, meaning and implications of the Anthropocene, writing a series
of books that have both stimulated and infuriated readers. He describes
this latest book as ‘groping toward understanding what it means… to have
arrived at this point in history’."

" I
have a simple view of governing today: We are in the middle of not one
but three climate changes at once to which government must help citizens
respond — and Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue and China does.

Here
is what I mean: We are in the middle of a change in the climate of the
climate. We are going from “later” to “now.” In the past you could fix
any climate/environmental problem later or now. But today later is
officially over. Later will be too late. At some point, the
deforestation of the Amazon is not reversible.

We
are the middle of a change in the “climate” of globalization. We are
going from an interconnected world to an interdependent one, and in such
a world your friends can hurt you faster than your enemies: Think what
happens if Mexico’s economy fails. And your rivals’ falling becomes more
dangerous than your rivals’ rising: We will be hurt a lot more by
China’s economy tanking than its putting tanks on islands in the South
China Sea.

And
lastly we’re in the middle of a change in the “climate” of technology.
We’re moving into a world where machines and software can analyze (see patterns that were always hidden before); optimize (tell a plane which altitude to fly each mile to get the best fuel efficiency); prophesize (tell you when your elevator will break and fix it before it does); customize (tailor any product or service for you alone) and digitize and automate just about any job. This is transforming every industry."

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

I am pleased to be able to share the announcment from the editors of this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication in which David Russell and I have a paper. They write:

"We are very pleased to announce that our CJC issue on the margins of cybernetics is now out and online! We wish to thank everyone of you for
your continuous effort and support throughout the editing process. We
believe that the issue altogether makes a very
strong and original contribution to the field and it wouldn’t be so
without you."

"This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) explores some of the connections between cybernetics and diverse fields of study: communication studies, media theory, philosophy, agriculture, and architecture. When putting it together, we intended to explore how the heritage of cybernetics has been put to work following the field’s relative decline."......

"Despite this less than favourable context, some scholars who had engaged with cybernetics continued to put its concepts to work, and recursively applied cybernetics principles to cybernetics itself. Their work, beginning in the 1970s, was labelled “second-order cybernetics” (Clarke & Hansen, 2009). Similar to those scholars who continued to apply cybernetics principles, we continue to believe that this field has value to communication studies."...

"Exploring the margins of something so profoundly marginal as cybernetics was both a challenge and a provocation for the authors who responded to our invitation. It was a productive challenge, because the margins came to mean different things for different authors. For some, the exploration of the margins meant bringing light, syntagmatically, to certain facets of cybernetics that have been neglected (Sheryl N. Hamilton), or to some of the intellectual movements overshadowed by the momentous visibility of cybernetics (GhislainThibault and Mark Hayward). For others who approached the issue paradigmatically, the margins constituted a space where a common set of ideas was meeting, emerging, telescoping, or transmuting. Whether these ideas shared by both cybernetics and other fields of research emerged independently (John Bonnett) or were direct loans (Jan Müggenburg), their commonality speaks of changing epistemic moments. Finally, three authors explore the importation, adaptation, and distortion of cybernetic metaphors, models, and concepts by other disciplines. In the cases explored here, the marginal nature of these loans, whether in architecture (Marion Roussel) or agriculture (David Russell and Ray Ison), was at odds with the established canons of strong disciplinary fields.".....

"David Russell and Ray Ison offer some insights into the challenge of implementing research informed by second-order cybernetics. The authors look back on thirty years of collaborative research, which they pursued in rural research and development as well as therapeutic praxis. Borrowing from the work of Gregory Bateson and Humberto Maturana, they show both the potential and the difficulty of applying a cybernetic framework in order to foster change in the relationship between actors and their environment (be it grazing animals in western New South Wales, Australia, or a patient in the context of a specific therapy).